So how it works in the French school system is that you basically go to school for 6 weeks and then take a two week break. So after a short month of school, I had ten days off last week to go gallivanting about. It's a great system. I went traveling throughout this time with a friend from my program Denise and along the way met up with many others. Denise is perfect to travel with because I don't think she know how to complain. Our first stop was Venice for Carnivale via overnight train from Paris. We had this great plan to spend the day in Paris before our train at 9pm, nevermind the fact that it was more or less a blizzard and we had all of our luggage for ten days and I had a paper due at 5pm. So we basically spent our day in a cafe in Paris as I wrote my paper. I suppose there could have been worse things to do. So at about 9pm on Thursday we piled into the cattle car that was taking us to Venice. Each cart had 6 beds, triple bunk beds on each side. THANKFULLY Denise and I got the top bunks and had two normal couples as roomies. Despite our initial good luck, the one couple decided it was appropriate to eat tuna and ham in a VERY enclosed space and the train was around 100 degrees the entire night and my mouth felt like sandpaper when I woke up. However, I was waking up to the Italian countryside out my window so I couldn't complain too much. We waited around the train station (which opened directly onto the water for Danielle and Molly (friends from Bucknell) to get there from Florence with another girl from their program. It was so so wonderful seeing friends again and I was basically smiling for the next ten days.
I can safely say I have never seen a city as beautiful as Venice. We took a water taxi from the train station to San Marco square, the central area for Carnivale AND the location of our apartment, and I just wanted to be taking pictures the entire time. Houses opened right on to the water! Robin was waiting for us at San Marco square and I could not have been happier to be reunited with her. UNTIL we met the owner of our apartment who walked us to our new home. It was actually perfect. It was right in the middle of all the Carnivale happenings and was beautiful. We had a full kitchen and living room, two bedrooms, a dining room, and a very nice bathroom. C'etait parfait. Once we dumped our bags, we walked around the city for the day, which is basically all tour books tell you to do anyways, and toured the Basilica. The streets were packed, which would normally give me heart palpitations but there was a very fun vibe throughout the city and the presence of the crowd ended up being more fun than overwhelming. There were also tons of people dressed in costume for Carnivale which was silly. I think we had a very ideal first night of Carnivale experience, eating pizza and drinking wine in San Marco's square during a drag queen fashion show. Being the good little tourists that we are, we bought masks and did not take them off for the rest of the weekend. We made friends with some Italians, wandered and gabbed, and called it a night just as the streets started to flood, as they tend to do at night we learned. I found it to be a very wonderful way to spend a night in Italy.
The next morning Emma came!!! I can not explain how wonderful it was to travel with her over this vacation. We were either laughing or talking with each other basically every second from this point on. I learned that we travel together wonderfully, although I think Emma would travel wonderfully with just about anyone since she's the most accommodating person I have ever met. We basically had a similar day of wandering BUT we did take a gondola ride! It cost us a pretty penny but it was very much worth it. Our gondaleer was a little rude but you know what they say about European customer service. We had a nice Italian dinner of lasagna and pizza and another joyful night of wandering. We met back up with our Italian friends and explored the city some more. I saw people from Bucknell which was horrifying so we ran away tout suite. Naturally, we ended the night at Burger King (Robin's decision) where we almost too perfectly ran into another big group of Americans. They were big lameos so we headed back to our apartment, which at this point was packed with 4 more girls who had come from Florence (Danielle's program) and Emma. So we slept 4 in a bed in my room which ended up great because I could not sleep and thus woke up and finished a paper I had to do. We also were up most of the night gabbing anyways.
The next day we parted ways with everyone (Denise, Emma, and I travelling on together) which was miserable. We had a lazy day around Venice and decided in the late afternoon to go check into the hotel we were staying in for the night because the apartment was booked. Now we were told it was 15 minutes from Venice. I realize now that they meant by plane. After a 45 minute water taxi ride, we got off in an extremely ugly city that was DEAD on account of it being a Sunday. We waited around for a bus that was crammed with bizarre smelly people and that had no signage as to where we were supposed to get off. So we basically got off and on the bus again, until we made a final stop, wandered for about 40 minutes in the slums, tried to get directions from the hotel concierge who spoke little to no English, I cried, and eventually we found it! It ended up being an absurdly nice hotel room, you just couldn't leave it. So we ate in the hotel restaurant, watched Italian reality shows, planned for Berlin, and then stole food from the continental breakfast for our lunch. A big upside was that the hotel was a 10 minute 'free' (because we couldn't figure out how to pay) bus ride from the airport. So on that lovely final note, we were off to Berlin!
Our spacious sleeper cabin. I think it says alot if that's how much space I took up of the bed just sitting.
Gondala ride!
First view of Venice from the train station.
One of the many beautiful rooms in our luxur apartment.
View of the sunset from our gondala ride.
Bucknell friends in Venice. I made Robin buy that mask. She was not pleased in hindsight.
Emma's favorite part of Carnivale.
One of the hundreds of pictures I took of the canals in Venice.
San Marco
More
The flooding! Unfortunately I forgot to bring my trash bag boots.
Pretty, pretty, pretty.
Robin wouldn't let us take many pictures of the people in costume because it held up the crowds but I managed a few.
View of San Marco square from the basilica
Friends!Berlin was easily my favorite city I have been to thus far. I don't really know how to describe/slash I am horribly ineloquent so excuse my stoner description of the city. Berlin really did have a vibe very differnt from anywhere I've been. It's not that the people were particularly friendly but everyone was just extremely open with us. I feel like since being in Europe I just naturally assume that everywhere I go people have no interest/patience for Americans, but everyone we met in Berlin seemed to not even notice one way or another.
It was a wonderful visit right from the beginning. We basically just guessed which train to take from the aiport and ended up about 1o minutes walking from our hostel which was right in downtown Berlin. Within 10 seconds of getting off the train we started slipping on the sidewalks that were literally covered in ice. It was also approximately -10 degrees celscius. Our hostel was very hip and we were easily the lamest people staying there. We became fast friends with Mosh, who worked at the front desk of the "Heart of Gold" hostel and recommended us a delicious place for German food and a bar called "White Trash." We were initially offended by the bar recommendation but then we realized he just wanted us to go there so we would bring him back a cheeseburger. The bar actually had an American band playing there from Utah who were quite awful. We ended up spending a majority of the night being enlightened by Mosh about Berlin in our hostel bar. A film festival was happening in Berlin while we were there and there were a lot of Danish people staying at our hostel. I could not get over how perfect their English was. They did not even have a trace of an accent, which made us all feel great about ourselves and made me recall when we were in Budapest two summers ago and a boy from Sweden corrected me when I said funner. Apparently in all of the Scandinavian countries the American movies and TV shows aren't dubbed, but just have subtitles, which explains a lot.
Since our time in Berlin was limited, we were trying to cram in as much as we could. So the natural choice was to take a 7 hour walking tour in the freezing cold. We met our tour guide at 11am at our hostel. His name was Preston and he really could not have been more annoying. He was from America and was easily the most pretentious person I have ever met. We started the tour seeing some standard monuments, like the oldest synagogue in Germany, Parliament etc. and then the tour started to take a bizarre turn, noticeably when we found ourselves outside the largest office building in all of Europe and then basically the Barnes n' Noble of Europe. We are still unsure as to why these were a part of our tour. We did see some cool things, like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews, Parliament, an original piece of the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Memorial to Murdered Homosexuals during the Holocaust. We also learned some great little fun facts, one being that Hitler was a stress eater and towards the end of his life he would eat at least one full chocolate cake a day! We also learned that even if you pay 12 euros for a tour, you can still get yelled at by the guide, multiple times. Preston liked to keep the pace of the tour at a slow jog so we found ourselves at one point literally running to catch up with him through the woods. We did however meet a great new friend on our tour from Perth, Australia who we got to heckle our guide with for the remainder of the tour. It was actually very reminiscent of high school field trips, which were always fun. Despite walking around for 10 hours we still had a list of places we wanted to see, so with our new friend Tim in tow we started a jog around the city to see The Eastside Gallery, the view from the top of Parliament, and what I was told was the biggest Aquarium in the world, but was really just an elevator in a hotel that was encased in a fish tank (I think I led our group to the wrong place...). The Eastside Gallery was easily my favorite. The art was beautiful and every piece had a wonderful and simple message. It was very surreal/unsettling to think about how recent the history we were learning was.
SO we finally sat down at around 9pm to eat, at the same German restaurant, and tried some traditional goulash. We also discovered Diesel, a mix of beer and coke, a drink that apparently everyone else already knows about but that I found quite refreshing. At this point it was physically painful to move but we still forced ourselves to take advantage of our last night. We parted ways with Tim for a quick power nap and rejoined at Zapata, a bar that we had seen on our tour that day. It's a very cool place. It's basically an abandoned building that artists have taken over as their studios and galleries. It is covered in their art and the outside section in the back is filled wth 3D art. It was also the first bar opened in East Berlin after the fall of the wall. It was too painful to do much but sit and gab but they did play Girl Talk there which was pretty wonderful. We had a grandiose plan to begin the next day at 9am so we could squeeze in some sites before our 3pm train to Prague, but in reality all we could manage was going back to the Zapata gallery and talking to an artist working there for an hour. Our experiences with him were the perfect way to end our trip to Berlin. Although he was on all sorts of drugs, he talked to us a lot about his life as a cultural anthropologist and the art scene in Berlin. Everywhere we went people just seemed much more comfortable with who they were there. It was definitely a very hip city, but it was a very different hipster than the ultra exclusive scene in the US. Everyone just seemed to act and do what they wanted and there was no prejudging of one another. Obviously this is an opinion from our short visit but I definitely want to return. Everyone we encountered was much hipper than us but no one seemed to care about any of that. It definitely made me want to return and gave me a good laugh about all the people from the US who take being hip means acting too cool for school.
Towards the beginning of our walking tour when I could still feel my fingers.
Delicious first night meal.
Outside of Zapata
THE hotel that Michael Jackson dangled his baby from. And yes this was a part of our walking tour.
Memorial to the members of Parliament killed during the Nazi reign
Memorial to the burned books
French Catholic Church
Eastside Gallery
A few of my favorites.
My favorite
Another favorite
Zapata GalleryOn to Prague!! We got out own cabin on the train which we turned into one big bed. We couldn't really sleep because we were all too filthy. Unfortunately (kind of) showering was not an option at our hostel in Berlin seeing as it was a public bathroom, without a lock, and a clear door on the shower. So that was our first order of business upon arrival. I made Emma and Denise watch UP on the train ride, which naturally put me in high spirits (pun intended) before Prague.
After being in Berlin, Prague felt like the south of France, although every sidewalk was similarly covered in ice, which proved to be quite the problem for me when we would venture out at night. There are about 15 Bucknell students studying abroad in Prague on the NYU program, all of them in the same building, so I must admit most of our trip revolved around spending time with them as opposed to soaking in the sites, although I do think our 13 hour walking tour in Berlin excused us a bit. Because we were staying with people who were living in the city for the semester, it was difficult to find people who even had a desire to see the sites. Luckily Robin rose to the occasion and gave us personalized walking tours everyday, which even included filler ancecdotes in between sites (Robin has since decided to make a career of her walking tours and is in the process of developing "Roaming with Robin" tours throughout Europe). Some of my favorite sites were Golden Lane, a street by the castle where people who used to work in the castle lived. It consisted of a bunch of miniature homes just my size that have all, naturally, been turned into gift shops. The Charles Bridge also gave us a beautiful view of the city at all times of day. Because we normally didn't get our act together until about 3 to do anything productive, most interiors of buildings were closed, so we spent most of our time wondering and listening to Robin read from a guide book, which ended up being much more enjoyable than our 12 euro tour from Preston in Berlin.
I was actually very suprised about how modern Prague seemed. It reminded me more of a US city than most that I have visited. Granted this is probably due in large part to the nature of the places we visited (the mall being one of them) but it was fun to be in a big city again (although most are big to me relative to Pittsburgh, Lewisburg, and Conneaut). Prague had a feel very similar to Amsterdam, probably beacuse they had recently legalized most recreational drugs.
Czech people were overall extremely friendly with us and almost everyone spoke perfect English, which was pretty embarassing but worked in our favor. I could not get over how many Americans there were in Prague. There are multiple study abroad programs set up there, and going out at night, or even to eat during the day, we easily encountered more Americans than anything else. Although it definitely made the city feel more comfortable, I have to say that as much as I complain, I do prefer being about 1 of 10 Americans in Tours. One night out and running into a group of football players from Williams reminded me why I was so excited to not be at Bucknell for another semester. Since we had an early flight out Sunday, we decided it would be a splendid idea to just stay out until our flight. We went to a 5 story club that is famous in all Prague guide books. We found the floor playing oldies and basically danced by ourselves until 5am. After that, we got our things from their apartment, stumbled to the airport, and off we went back to gay Paris!
Me in my natural habitat at Golden Lane
Emma!
Charles Bridge. Before Robin had a panic attack from all the birds.
Kafka Museum
View of the castle from the Charles Bridge
More sites from the bridge
All my friends!
The cover of Robin's tour guide brochure.
The mailroom crew reunited.After ten days of travelling, I was broke, filthy, and had no clean clothes. Needless to say I was very excited to be back in Tours. ALTHOUGH our flight from Prague to Paris was actually terrifying and I thought it was going to plummet from the sky at any moment. I even tried to turn on my phone at one point to send an SOS. Luckily we made it back and I was greeted with a nice home cooked meal and a very clean room. I could not have been happier.
Since my return, I only have a few new updates from Tours. We braved a pub quiz night at a bar we like to go to (mainly because the owner is Irish and doesn't laugh when we speak in French). We got last place which was pretty embarassing but I'm going to blame it on forgetting my glasses and not being able to see the projector. We also had our third excursion to Chateau Azay-le-Rideau and a Vannerie. The chateau was a little bubby one and they didn't really have a good bed selection so I wasn't very impressed. The vannerie was pretty cool, although I get sort of sad that they keep taking us to these old male artisans who live and work alone. It's moderately depressing. We tried to be very cultured and go to the opera here on Sunday. It was Romeo and Juliet so I was very excited UNTIL the person who played Romeo was a woman, and not for the sake of making a statement, just poor casting. It was quite dissapointing so we left at intermission. The weather has been beautiful around here so we just promenaded for a while so it ended ok. All in all life is wonderful here. Our group has gotten very close and we've been giving Tours night life more of a chance and have found it to be pretty fun. We have the DELF exam tomorrow, which is an all day exam that tests our level of proficiency in French, if I have not already written about it. After that, I am off to London for the weekend to meet up with Maeve, Emma, Nicole, Lee, Katie and more! I can not wait!!
À tout!!
xoxoxoxo
Annie O.
Since my return, I only have a few new updates from Tours. We braved a pub quiz night at a bar we like to go to (mainly because the owner is Irish and doesn't laugh when we speak in French). We got last place which was pretty embarassing but I'm going to blame it on forgetting my glasses and not being able to see the projector. We also had our third excursion to Chateau Azay-le-Rideau and a Vannerie. The chateau was a little bubby one and they didn't really have a good bed selection so I wasn't very impressed. The vannerie was pretty cool, although I get sort of sad that they keep taking us to these old male artisans who live and work alone. It's moderately depressing. We tried to be very cultured and go to the opera here on Sunday. It was Romeo and Juliet so I was very excited UNTIL the person who played Romeo was a woman, and not for the sake of making a statement, just poor casting. It was quite dissapointing so we left at intermission. The weather has been beautiful around here so we just promenaded for a while so it ended ok. All in all life is wonderful here. Our group has gotten very close and we've been giving Tours night life more of a chance and have found it to be pretty fun. We have the DELF exam tomorrow, which is an all day exam that tests our level of proficiency in French, if I have not already written about it. After that, I am off to London for the weekend to meet up with Maeve, Emma, Nicole, Lee, Katie and more! I can not wait!!
À tout!!
xoxoxoxo
Annie O.
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